At the time, they had less than 1% of the market. They were indeed the world’s largest music retailer just a couple years later. And as Steve Jobs started rolling out better and more functional iPods, I started telling everybody that the company would in a couple years start selling “iMiniMacBookPros For Your Pocket” — the iPhone as it turned out. So I stuck with my Apple because my “bottom up” analysis, meaning I found the stock individually based on analysis for it and it alone, and not necessarily for the entire sector. “Top Down” means you start with a sector or an economic concept and then drill down.

So back to Facebook – I waited until after Facebook had come public and crashed after its IPO instead of buying it the day it came public. I got lucky in waiting because the stock subsequently fell to where I thought it actually looked cheap – at $26 a share — and it has quickly run above $32 a share in the two weeks since.

Nothing’s easy and I sure don’t expect navigating the stock market and the other asset classes we choose to expose ourselves and our money to is going to be easy. But I don’t expect that rates will spike up in the US tomorrow and even if they do, I don’t expect that the markets will crash when rates initially make that move.

Good morning and thank you all for understanding my need to take some time off last week to deal with the ramifications, both logistical and emotional, from the fire. I had a Doctorate of Forest Rehabilitation (who knew that was a title!) walk through my torched property (I learned from him that “scorched” means the land and trees survived while “torched” means it was truly burnt to a crisp). I’ve got my work cut out to protect my top soil from eroding with the monsoon season, but the land will come back beautiful if we do it right. And I had a Doctorate of Psychology walk through my head – with all the post traumatic stress disorder symptoms that evacuating and running from 9/11 and almost losing my house and actually losing much of my land to an inferno prompted me to actually start going to therapy to help me deal with all of this.

I’ll be around if there’s any crazy spikes or crashes in the markets, but it’s been a long time since I took a whole week off of writing and I need to take this week off to get my head and personal affairs back in some semblance of order.

All that said, I’m less than convinced that the markets would crash no matter what happens with Greece this weekend because we’ve been obsessing about it all so much over here for so long already — meaning it’s likely already more than baked in from a longer/intermediate-term perspective, even if Monday is down 2%.

I remain very confident that we will see another stock market bubble before we see the collapse, but I am also confident that I will be flexible enough to change my mind and/or sell and hedge before that collapse. I have no crystal ball though and I could be wrong — but I’d ask you this: If the Western Civilization collapses and takes out the vast majority of our stock investments, I’m not sure that my stock investments would even make the Top 5 concerns on my “What I’m worried about” list, you know?

Even after the recent sell-offs and newfound panic over the EU-crisis, the DJIA is up nearly 30% since that panic. I could be wrong, but I continue to think that we’ll likely see these markets up a bunch from these levels in a couple/three years when this current batch of newfound panic over the EU-crisis plays itself out.

To be clear — my family, my pets and I are fine. My property was devastated by the fire, but my house, as of yesterday morning, was still standing. Even if I have lost my house, I’ll be fine — as I went through my house at 2am Friday night looking for things that “are important” to pack, I realized once again how little all material goods, including even our homes, really matter. Andrew Lanyi used to tell me that “If it doesn’t bleed, you don’t cry for it” and that’s the truth.

The Cody Inbox Hate-O-Meter went off the deep end with my declaration that I’m now buying Facebook at $26 a share. I’d say about 90% of my feedback was negative/dismissive or outright angry from my recent “I’m the only idiot buying Facebook right now” columns.

About The Cody Word

Cody Willard writes the Revolution Investing investment newsletter for MarketWatch and posts the trades from his personal account at TradingWithCody.com He is the founder of WallStreetAll-Stars.com and the principal of CL Willard Capital. Cody serves as an adjunct professor at Seton Hall University and is on the University of New Mexico Alumni Board. He was an anchor on the Fox Business Network, where he was the co-host of the long-time #1-rated show on the network, Fox Business Happy Hour. Cody, a former hedge fund manager, and his stock picks and economic outlooks have been featured on NBC’s The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, ABC’s 20/20, CBS Evening News, CNBC’s SquawkBox, Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, as well as in the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and many other outlets.